Tag: Fuzzy Front End

I would be excited to facilitate a innovation workshop for your team or organization. The material can be customized around your industry and challenges. We will work together to explore multiple innovation techniques and add them to your strategy toolbox:

The app is the Taco Bell mobile app; customers can earn rewards, get coupons, and order food for pickup. After conducting customer interviews and a small survey (n=2), the biggest consumer problem is the need to get fast food into the customer’s mouth faster. The existing pickup experience has too much friction; it requires the customer to tell us when he is on his way and to read a number to the cashier.

Feature Overview

The new feature would rely on license plate optical character recognition (OCR) scanners to notify the food preparation team to make the food when the customer pulls into the parking lot and to notify the cashier which car to hand the food to in the drive through. Taco Bell and Dominos are the market leaders in using technology to improve their fast food deliver experience, but the same feature would improve any app to physical pickup experience.

Personas

Our target customer is “David Drive Through”. He has a smart phone with a data plan that he uses continually. David eats Taco Bell more than once per week. He orders the same thing 60% of the time, but he is attracted to new items and specials. David uses the drive through when he is on the way to work and he will not eat here if he thinks it will take too long. If Dave comes with friends, they will come into the store so they can each pay separately (future feature idea).

User Stories

As David placing my first online order, I want to enter my license plate number, so that I can get my food faster.

As David placing my second order online, I just want to pick my food and hit the order button, so that the experience can be as transparent as possible.

-Verify that the customer can hit one button to repeat last order.

As David after I receive my food, I want to receive an in app notification, so that I can know my credit card was charged.

-Verify that there is a feedback mechanism in the alert to block fraudulent purchases.

As the food preparation team, I want David’s food added to my order que when he pulls into the parking lot, so we can have it hot and ready for him.

As the cashier, I want to know when I should hold David’s food out the window, so he does not even have to stop.

As the restaurant manager, I want to report against in app purchase in my location, so that I can manage my business.

Validation/Modeling

The expectation is that this feature will save time for the cashier, make the food preparation more effective, drive new customers into stores, and increase the frequency that existing customers visit the store. We will measure or estimate each of these variables to justify the cost of two OCR scanners in each location and the development expense. I propose we pilot this feature in the Sioux Falls market, where we can iteratively improve the feature before a nationwide launch.

I got asked to sign a NDA yesterday. It is something people ask about a lot, and something I always refuse to sign.

Ideas are cheap (my going rate is probably $1 per idea), turning an idea into a successful feature/product/business is the hard part.

“If there were an efficient market, I could simply “sell” my idea to whoever wanted to buy it for “fair market value” (lets say $1,000). Right now, the simple cost of figuring out what the idea might be worth is likely more than the idea itself. This is a clear case of the transaction costs exceeding the cost of the item.”